Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Chbosky

Chbosky’s line lands with the soft force of a late-night confession: half shrug, half lifeline. The repeated “I guess” and “maybe” aren’t verbal clutter; they’re a posture. This is a speaker who distrusts grand theories of the self, who knows that trauma, family, class, chemistry, and sheer accident build a person faster than any tidy narrative can explain. The sentence admits ignorance without turning it into despair, which is exactly why it resonates with readers who’ve spent years trying to reverse-engineer their own damage.

The subtext is a rebuttal to two seductive fantasies. One is total determinism: you are your origin story, so your future is just reruns. The other is hyper-agency: just decide to be better and you will. Chbosky threads a third path: you don’t get to choose the first chapter, but you can still author revisions. Notice how the language shifts from abstract (“reasons,” “power,” “choose”) to plain, almost childlike verbs: “go,” “do,” “try.” It’s agency scaled to human size.

Context matters: Chbosky’s work is steeped in adolescent interiority, where every feeling is absolute and every mistake feels permanent. The quote offers a pragmatic mercy. “We can try to feel okay” isn’t a demand for happiness; it’s permission to live with imperfect choices, to keep moving without full understanding or clean absolution. That’s the quiet radicalism here: not self-mythology, not self-blame, just forward motion with a little grace.